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Parallel computing institute CONNECTNEWSLETTER OF THE COORDINATED SCIENCE LABORATORY VOL. TWO, NO. 2 | 2 0 1 1 continued from front page

Center and the Institute for Advanced Computation and Applications Technology. Illinois is also an impor- tant participant in projects such as the DOE’s Exascale CSL to accelerate performance with Software Stack and the DARPA Ubiquitous High- Performance Computing program. new parallel computing institute Today’s programmers often lack the skills necessary to write code for many-core systems. One of PCI’s early thrusts will be research and education that make it easier to program on parallel platforms. PCI will also focus on extreme scale, high-end com- puting for compute-heavy applications, such as those that will utilize resources like Blue Waters, which will boast a peak performance of 10 quadrillion calculations per second when it goes online. Research areas include building compilers for single-chip parallelism, design- Save the Date! October 28, 2011 ing new architectures for massively parallel systems and creating new algorithms to solve complex problems. 60th Anniversary Symposium: “The Parallel Computing Institute provides the Building Interdisciplinary strong base of infrastructure and expertise needed Excellence with Societal Impact to transform the way we design and interact with massively parallel computing systems,” said Ilesanmi The event will celebrate CSL’s Adesida, dean of Illinois’ College of Engineering. impact on technology— The institute intends to capitalize on growing past, present and future. industry interest in parallelism, says Wen-mei Hwu, The Coordinated Science Laboratory has launched a new Parallel computing provides the most powerful and effi- PCI Chief Scientist, CSL Researcher and AMD-Jerry interdisciplinary institute that will provide the resources to cient infrastructure for computation-heavy applications. It Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering. October 28, 2011 enable breakthroughs in parallel computing. is a key element of modern computing, ranging from multi- “Many commercial developers and software vendors B02 Coordinated Science The Parallel Computing Institute will arm researchers core processors in commodity electronics to are beginning to tackle parallel programming issues,” Laboratory and educators with the support they need to address major with nearly a million processing elements. Hwu said. “We want to be the place where they come computational challenges in science, engineering, health and “Illinois is already a leader in parallel computing, with tre- for help.” www.csl.illinois.edu/60 business, among other areas. PCI will serve as an incubator mendous depth and breadth in this area,” said PCI Director “In the tradition of CSL initiatives, the Parallel for parallel initiatives by: Bill Gropp, CSL researcher and the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Computing Institute will look at how parallel comput- • expanding access to resources and infrastructure, Professor of Computer Science. “What PCI aims to do is to ing innovations can be created for platforms ranging • teaching critical skills to graduate and undergraduate provide researchers in different disciplines the opportunity from embedded devices to the largest supercomputers, students, to collaborate in an innovative, resource-rich environment. and for a diverse set of applications,” said William • creating more opportunities for funding and estab- By approaching problems in a strategic, interdisciplinary H. Sanders, director of the Coordinated Science lishing key external partnerships, way, we can develop solutions with greater impact.” Laboratory. “With a comprehensive, multi-faceted • sharing center creation expertise with research The center will leverage Illinois’ strength in parallel com- approach, we will develop software and hardware solu- www.csl.illinois.edu teams who want to do high-impact work in parallel puting. Illinois is already the home to the NSF Blue Waters tions needed to advance technology for the future.” computing. Petascale Computer, the CUDA Center of Excellence, the Intel/Microsoft Universal Parallel Computing Research

continued on back mail page Y R O T A R O B A L E C N E I C S D E T A N I D R O O C F r o m t h e D i r e c t o r

In recent years, parallel computing has opened up possibilities previously unimagined – and we’ve only scratched the surface. Over the next decades, parallel computing will provide the backbone for breakthroughs in critical

Image courtesy of NOAA areas such as medicine (reading MRIs in real time), bioengineering (DNA sequencing) and astronomy (understanding how the cosmos formed), among others. It will also transform the way we work and

play by enabling interactive, immersive virtual realities. T C E N N O C Illinois researchers capture images of first With its strong roots in high-performance computing, the University of Illinois is well poised to lead this technology revolution. That’s why the Coordinated Science Laboratory, with the participation of Illinois faculty from many academic departments,

has launched the Parallel Computing Institute, an interdisciplinary center that will provide support to researchers who are tackling these complex tsunami-related airglow signature 1 1 0 2 | 2 R E B M U N , O W T E M U L O V problems. Researchers at the University of Illinois As a tsunami moves across the ocean, tsunamis. Currently, scientists rely on have become the first to record an air- it produces atmospheric gravity waves ocean-based buoys and models to track Why is CSL leading this endeavor? From our historical contributions to our present-day strengths, we have the experience and tools necessary to help glow signature in the upper atmosphere forced by centimeter-level surface undu- and predict the path of a tsunami. Previ- guide the effort. produced by a tsunami. The activity was lations. The amplitude of the waves can ous upper atmospheric measurements CSL researchers have been involved in high-performance computing since the days of the ILLIAC machines. For example, CSL research engineer observed using a camera system based reach several kilometers where the neu- of the tsunami signature relied on GPS W.J. Bouknight helped develop the ILLIAC IV array-based , one of the earliest massively parallel systems, in the 1960s and ‘70s. in Maui, Hawaii. tral atmosphere coexists with the plasma measurements, which are limited by The signa- in the ionosphere, the number of data points that can be Since then, CSL researchers have: ture, caused by causing perturba- obtained, making it difficult to create an • Invented cube-connected cycles, an architecture for massively parallel processing. the March 11 tions that can be image. It would take more than 1,000 earthquake that imaged. GPS receivers to capture comparable • Built the first multiprocessor using microprocessors, AMP-1. devastated Japan, On the night data to that of one camera system. In ad- • Developed the Illinois Protocol, used today by most cache coherent multi-core processors. was observed in of the tsunami, dition, some areas, such as Hawaii, don’t • Invented optimal pipeline scheduling with delay insertions, which led to the development of software pipelining in compilers. an airglow layer conditions above have enough landmass to accumulate 250 kilometers Hawaii for viewing the number of GPS units it would take to • Created Superblocks, a compiler innovation that extended the applicability of software pipelining from Fortran loops to general above the the airglow signa- image horizon to horizon. C programs, leading to the HP-Intel Itanium platform that now plays an important role in the server market. earth’s surface. ture were optimal. In contrast, one camera can image • Contributed to the development of the Cedar machine and helped pioneer parallelizing FORTRAN Compilers. It preceded the It was approaching the entire sky. However, the sun, moon • Used predicated or guarded instructions to improve instruction-level parallelism. tsunami by one dawn (nearly 2 am and clouds can limit the utility of camera hour, suggesting local time) with measurements from the ground. By fly- • Created influential tools such the IMPACT compiler, which has contributed to the foundation of compilers for Intel’s line of IA-64 that the technology could be used as an no sun, moon or clouds obstructing the ing a camera system on a geo-stationary microchips as well as VLIW processors, used in many DSP and GPU chips today. early-warning system in the future. view of the night sky. satellite in space, scientists would be More recently, CSL has been involved in the development of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Blue Waters, a petascale computer; The observation confirms a theory Along with graduate student Thom- able to avoid these limitations while the CUDA Center for Excellence, which pursues advances in many-core computing research; the EcoG Supercomputer that earned Illinois the #3 spot on developed in the 1970s that the signa- as Gehrels, Makela analyzed the images simultaneously imaging a much larger the November 2010 Green 500 most energy-efficient computers in the world; and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, ture of tsunamis could be observed in and was able to isolate specific wave region of the earth. the upper atmosphere, specifically the periods and orientations. In collabora- To create a reliable system, Makela which transfers high performance computing to the larger research community. ionosphere. But until now, it had only tion with researchers at the Institut de says that scientists would have to de- CSL researchers – who hail from computer science, electrical and computer engineering and many other disciplines – continue to tackle hardware, been demonstrated using radio signals Physique du Globe de Paris, CEA-DAM- velop algorithms that could analyze software and middleware problems related to parallel computing in a strategic, multidisciplinary way. broadcast by satellites. DIF in France, Instituto Nacional de Pes- and filter data in real-time. And the best “Imaging the response using the quisais Espaciais (INPE) in Brazil, Cornell solution would also include a network of Our goal is to enable researchers to connect with resources and to bridge the outstanding efforts currently underway at Illinois. Together with our airglow is much more difficult because University in Ithaca, NY, and NOVELTIS ground-based cameras and GPS receiv- partners, we aim to harness the power of computing and enhance life for future generations. the window of opportunity for mak- in France, the researchers found that ers working with the satellite-based sys- ing the observations is so narrow, and the wave properties matched those in tem to combine the individual strengths had never been achieved before,” said the ocean-level tsunami measurements, of each measurement technique. William H. Sanders Jonathan Makela, an Illinois professor of confirming that the pattern originated “This is a reminder of how intercon- electrical and computer engineering and from the tsunami. The team also cross- nected our environment is,” Makela said. researcher in the Coordinated Science checked their data against theoretical “This technique provides a powerful new Managing Editor: Kim Gudeman Laboratory. “Our camera happened to be models and measurements made using tool to study the coupling of the ocean Contributing Writers: April Dahlquist, CSL; Rick in the right place at the right time.” GPS receivers. and atmosphere and how tsunamis Kubetz, College of Engineering; Jennifer La Tsunamis can generate appreciable Makela believes that camera propagate across the open ocean.” Montagne, Computer Science; and Tom Moone, Electrical & Computer Engineering. wave amplitudes in the upper atmo- systems could be a significant aid in sphere – in this case, the airglow layer. creating an early warning system for Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please send them to [email protected]. volume two, number 2 | 2011 CONNECT COORDINATED SCIENCE LABORATORY Error-free hardware? GoldMine guarantees it By Kim Gudeman CSL researcher Shobha Vasudevan has de- GoldMine is a one-of-a-kind tool that 2009, when they used the Rigel multicore veloped a tool that makes it easier to detect uses both formal verification and data min- architecture developed by CSL researcher Baraniuk’s platform connects educators, custom textbooks hardware errors during the verification ing to generate assertions. Formal verifica- Sanjay Patel as a test bed for the tool. stage of the semiconductor design cycle. tion provides content for the design that Subsequently, Vasudevan’s team, which By April Dahlquist The site is not-for-profit and is sponsored by the Hewlett GoldMine is an automatic assertion- helps guide the data mining, which infers consists of four graduate students, man- As a graduate student in the Coordinated Sci- Foundation, the Maxfield Foundation, the National Science generation tool that integrates formal patterns from simulation data. aged to scale GoldMine to the open source ence Laboratory, Richard Baraniuk made the Foundation and other contributors. Now that Connexions has connection between research and education. achieved the initial hurdle of lowering operating costs to zero, the verification and It proffers a solu- UltraSparc processor. After receiving his PhD in electrical and next goal is to not only have textbooks customized for each class- data mining to tion to the troublesome Several companies are already using computer engineering from Illinois in ’92, room, but for each student. Baraniuk wants to create a textbook guarantee reli- coverage closure prob- the technology, for which the University is Baraniuk continued his educational pursuits that “learns about you, while you are learning from it.” Meaning, able, fault-free lem faced by designers currently seeking licensing. at Rice University in Texas, where he founded the textbook figures out how each student learns best, knows the hardware. The and verification engi- In addition to verification, GoldMine Connexions, or CNX.org. Connexions is an student’s motivations and interests and can give the student infor- methodology neers, who often don’t could be used for other phases of the educational platform where anyone can submit materials, and mation that best suits him or her. was presented know how many tests design cycle, such as reliability and fault professors can then select the information they want to build their Baraniuk’s research at Illinois helped set the foundation for at the DATE to run to ensure that a detection. That would open up applica- perfect textbook, customized for each class. Connexions. While in the signal processing group under Jones, he 2010 and 2011 conferences and, more design is bug-free. It can be used for formal tions in security, including monitoring and “This takes the worked on a time-fre- recently, at this spring’s DVCon 2011 confer- verification, simulation-based verification detecting hardware trojans. pressure off stu- quency analysis project ence, where EDA journalists selected it as or even post-silicon verification. For Vasudevan’s team, the next step is dents having to buy that represented signals one of the most interesting tools. “When the formal verification says that to apply GoldMine’s techniques to software. increasingly expensive and data like a musical “When you don’t have enough cover- something is false, it gives us a reason why Vasudevan believes that by using data min- textbooks, and makes score. age in your design validation, you could it’s false,” said Vasudevan, who received a ing to create likely assertions in software the textbooks even “[My time at Illinois] be making hardware that has flaws in it,” CAREER Award for GoldMine in 2010. “We systems, GoldMine can give developers a better,” Baraniuk really provided me with said Vasudevan, an assistant professor of plug these counterexamples back into high level of confidence in their products. said. “Instructors can a great, solid founda- electrical and computer engineering. “It GoldMine, which adjusts for the new infor- “The idea of using data mining with customize the book tion for what I’ve could cost millions of dollars if you’re a mation. As we do this iteratively, we reach formal tools is something that hasn’t been so it is just right for done with my career,” semiconductor company and have to recall a point where there’s no more counterex- explored before,” she said. “As a result, the everyone at Illinois… Baraniuk said. your hardware. If you’re an airline or car amples and we have reached a complete net effect is very powerful, evidenced by or wherever.” In addition, while company and your hardware fails, it could test set.” the interest the tool has received from After the instructor Baraniuk was at Illinois cost lives.” Vasudevan and her student David companies.” builds the textbook he was involved with Sheridan initially developed GoldMine in from the information the computer-based available on the site, education research lab students can either under former ECE electronically use professor Don Bitzer. 3D PRINTING METHOD ADVANCES ELECTRICALLY SMALL ANTENNA DESIGN the textbook for free “I think it helped While most electronic components benefit from decreased size, antennas—whether in a cell phone or on an aircraft—suffer limitations or buy it at an extremely low cost. For example, a conventional spark an interest in novel ways of thinking of educational technol- in gain, efficiency, system range, and bandwidth when their size is reduced below a quarter-wavelength. publisher charges $129 for a 600-page statistics textbook, while a ogy,” Jones said. CSL researcher Jennifer Truman Bernhard, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has proposed a way to overcome these comparable version from Connexions would cost $29. Baraniuk still has many Illinois ties, as he is currently working limitations through omnidirectional printing of metallic nanoparticle inks. She is collaborating on the research with Jennifer A. Lewis, the “I think it is a part of the future of education,” said CSL on a five year Department of Defense grant with CSL researchers Hans Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. researcher Doug Jones, Baraniuk’s previous advisor and professor Tom Huang, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Tamer Başar. They are The research findings and fabrication methods developed by Bernhard, Lewis, and their colleagues are featured in the cover article, of electrical and computer engineering. researching opportunistic sensing. “Illinois Calling” of the March 18 issue of Advanced Materials (“Conformal Printing of Electrically Small Antennas on Three-Dimensional Surfaces”). These types of textbooks are especially advantageous for subjects Baraniuk, who is still at Rice, looks at unique ways to repre- According to Bernhard, these antennas are electrically small relative to a wavelength (typically a twelfth of a wavelength or less) and exhibit performance metrics where new research rapidly changes the field of study. Instead of sent and process massive data sets when not consumed by his that are an order of magnitude better than those realized by monopole antenna designs. Conformal printing allows the antenna’s meander lines to be printed on the using an outdated textbook, professors can build a textbook with Connexions “hobby.” outside or inside of hemispherical substrates, adding to its flexibility. the most up-to-date information. Baraniuk is extremely grateful for the opportunity he had to The design can be rapidly adapted to new specifications, including other operating frequencies, device sizes, or encapsulated designs that offer enhanced In fact, a similar situation inspired Baraniuk to create explore signal processing in great depths at the CSL. mechanical robustness. Connexions in 1999. At Rice, he became frustrated by a lack “CSL in particular and U of I in general is such a diverse place of textbooks appropriate for his undergraduate students. In the and there are so many opportunities for learning about ideas last couple of years, the website has really taken off, he says. He outside your exact PhD topic. You can become a really well attributes this recent increase in use to the recession and the rising versed person in a whole bunch of different ideas,” Baraniuk said. Gropp named SIAM Fellow costs of textbooks. “I would have never done things like Connexions if I had not CSL researchers receive CAREER Awards By Jenny Applequist, ITI, and April Dahlquist, CSL Jennifer La Montagne, Computer Science learned to look beyond my field of study.” Matthew Caesar, Negar Kiyavash and Sayan Mitra all won NSF William Gropp, director of CSL’s new CAREER awards this spring. Parallel Computing Institute, was Caesar (Computer Science) won for his proposal to design the named a Fellow of the Society for first interactive debugging system for modern networked systems. Industrial and Applied Mathematics “Green GPS” calculates most fuel-efficient route Kiyavash (Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering) won for her (SIAM) this spring. A new software interface reduces energy Urbana-Champaign campus, hopes research Varney, director of Transportation & Automo- work on the impact of timing in network security. Mitra (Electrical Gropp’s development of algo- consumption in transportation systems. will help maximize fuel efficiency for the tive Services. and Computer Engineering) was awarded the grant for his research rithms and software for high per- Green GPS, developed by computer fleet. The units will be installed on up to 200 In addition, researchers are developing on algorithms and verification for reliable distributed cyber-physi- formance computing, specifically the creation of the MPI, has scientists at the University of Illinois at vehicles, including full-size vans that could a social network of drivers who can share cal systems. earned him this title. MPI is the standard interprocessor commu- Urbana-Champaign, works like general GPS be carrying 1,000 pounds or more in tools information about their cars. In the future, The CAREER award, given to the most promising young nication interface for large-scale parallel computers. navigation, except that in addition to calcu- and equipment. that would provide the basis for a commu- researchers, provides funding for scientists to continue and expand lating the shortest and fastest routes, it also “The less money we can spend on nity that allows drivers who don’t have the their work. projects the most fuel-efficient route. fuel, the more money we can direct toward technology to use the service based on data Yim scores gold By April Dahlquist, CSL “Currently at least 30 percent of total maintaining other things on campus,” said collected from cars with the same make, Gunsalus named AAAS delegate energy in the United model and year. CSL PhD student Keun Soo Yim (Computer Science) received the By April Dahlquist, CSL States is spent on cars,” In preliminary experiments, researchers gold award in the Samsung Human-Tech Thesis Prize competition. said Principal Investiga- were able to show that following the sugges- CSL researcher C.K. (Tina) Gunsalus was Under advisor Ravi Iyer (ECE), Yim designed software and tor Tarek Abdelzaher, tion of Green GPS saves 13 percent more fuel elected to the American Association for hardware techniques that can detect and tolerate hardware faults associate professor over the fastest route and 6 percent over the the Advancement of Science (AAAS). in high performance machines, including Graphic Processing Units. of computer science shortest. The initial test was conducted on 16 Gunsalus, who has been active in Yim’s new design can maximize fault detection with little overhead. and researcher in the cars of various types that collectively drove the organization for many years, will Coordinated Science for 1,000 miles in Urbana-Champaign, a city serve a three-year term as a delegate to the Societal Impacts of Science and Rutenbar wins IEEE best paper award Laboratory. “By saving of 170,000. By Jennifer La Montagne, Computer Science even 5 percent of that Abdelzaher hopes that the collabora- Engineering Council, where she will be Rob Rutenbar and his former student, Dr. Amith Singhee (IBM) are cost, we can save the tion with IBM will open up opportunities to responsible for electing fellows and members to AAAS’ board of the winners of the 2011 IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided De- same amount of total test the service in heavily urban areas with directors. Y R O T A R O B A L E C N E I C S D E T A N I D R O O C sign Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award for their paper “Statisti- energy spent on the na- greater stop-and-go traffic. Gunsalus is a professor emerita of business and director of cal Blockade: Very Fast Statistical Simulation and Modeling of Rare tion’s entire information “The preliminary results gave us hope CSL’s National Center for Professional & Research Ethics (nation- Circuit Events and Its Application to Memory Design,” published technology infrastruc- that if we deploy it, it will be useful,” he said. alethicscenter.org). originally in August 2009. The paper presented a radically new strat- ture.” “If we can minimize brown energy and maxi- “AAAS is a very important organization and I’m so pleased to egy for so-called “rare event” failure statistics in memory designs. The technology mize green energy, we reduce our carbon have a chance to work with others to further its worthy mission,” runs on cell phones, footprint.” Gunsalus said. which links to a car’s computer using an inexpensive, off-the-shelf wireless adapter that works in all cars manu- Economist touts Agha’s bridge-monitoring research Başar writes the factured since 1996. The car’s onboard diag- book on network nostics system uploads information about If you can make a car smart enough to know it needs repairs, why couldn’t you do the same for security

T C E N N O C engine performance and fuel efficiency to bridges? CSL researcher Gul Agha, a professor of computer science, and Civil Engineering Profes- the phone, which uses the data to compute sor Bill Spencer are studying how to create such “superstructures,” recently the topic of a feature ECE Professor Tamer Başar, a the greenest route. in The Economist. researcher in the Coordinat-

A grant through the National Science The resesarch team has created an inexpensive system for continuous, reliable structural ed Science Laboratory, and 1 1 0 2 | 2 R E B M U N , O W T E M U L O V Foundation to Abdelzaher and Robin Kravets, health monitoring. The approach uses dense arrays of wireless smart sensors and concurrent his co-author Tansu Alpcan (MSEE ’01, PhD ’06) are providing assistance to also a member of Illinois’ computer science and distributed real-time processing to overcome the limitations inherent in traditional systems. faculty, is funding a large-scale deployment those who are fighting security threats with their Already, researchers have produced a customizable software framework that simplifies develop- of the service via the University of Illinois’ car new publication, “Network Security,” which has ment for smart sensor platforms. just been published by Cambridge University fleet. The Office of Naval Research is funding CSL STUDENT CONFERENCE DRAWS MORE THAN 100 ATTENDEES In 2009, the team deployed the largest civil infrastructure monitoring system to date, and Press. research related to the technology’s net- In late January, more than 100 students and faculty attended the 6th annual CSL Student Conference. The working component. Researchers, including conference was organized by CSL graduate students and included student presentations, invited speakers the only one using dense wireless arrays, on Jindo Bridge in South Korea. and a panel discussion. Başar and Alpcan began the project more than graduate student Hossein Ahmadi, also are seven years ago when Alpcan was a graduate stu- For more information about Agha’s research: collaborating with IBM through its “Smarter This year, three new components were added: a CSL-themed website, a systems and hardware design dent at Illinois. Their goal was to apply “a more Planet” initiative. session and a poster session. In the poster session, students who did not yet have any published results http://osl.cs.uiuc.edu/people systematic way of formulating network intrusion Pete Varney, who oversees some of were invited to make a poster about their work. http://www.economist.com/node/17647603?story_id=17647603&fsrc=rss problems and network security problems in gen- the approximately 500 vehicles used by the eral,” said Başar. Conference co-organizer Peter Kairouz said the event achieved its goal of facilitating interaction between students and giving them opportunities to learn about each other’s research.